2022-08-11 We Create Our Own Reality

2022-08-11 We Create Our Own Reality

“These illusions lead to a really substantial problem. They lead us to think that everybody is seeing the same thing that we are when, in reality, two people looking at exactly the same world could be taking in different information at the same time.”

Grand Challenges

It’s an idea I first encountered during a One Hundred Ways Anything Can Be Different in the Future game that I led at the Institute for the Future’s annual Ten-Year Forecast conference, on “the future of learning.” One of the game’s participants flipped the fact “Today, college students have to pick a major, like biology, business administration, English literature, or political science” to “Ten years from now, college students have to pick a grand challenge, like climate action, ending poverty, gender equality, or zero hunger.” She explained the concept to our group: Students interested in all kinds of subject areas and careers—engineering, communications, teaching, political service, entrepreneurship, medicine, the arts—would come together and spend two to three years developing knowledge and skills around specific urgent global challenges. Instead of siloed majors, college learning would be more interdisciplinary and purpose driven. And careers, instead of being about choosing an industry or profession, would be more about deciding what problem you want to help humanity solve—as an engineer, mental health counsellor, filmmaker, journalist, investment banker, nutritionist, marketing creative, social worker, or whatever else you might do with your days. Every type of major or career would be reimagined in service of something much, much bigger. Every course would look at a different angle of the problem—historical, economic, scientific, political, cultural—or explore possible solution spaces or interventions—technological, social, financial, behavioral. No one would worry that their major was “irrelevant” or that they would wind up in a “bullshit” job. It’s all hands on deck for things that really matter.

Westworld